A blog to share security, networking and cloud related technology information as @vCloudernBeer picked up on his search for his destiny in the cloud. (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chowanthony)

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is gaining traction these days both in the enterprise and in the carrier market. The main driving force is NFV's ability to reduce CAPEX and OPEX by moving the the network function from purpose-built, expensive and sometimes under utilized hardware to software that can be run in a virtualized form (virtual machine or Linux container).

Open Platform NFV - OPNFV

The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Open Platform NFV project whose goal is to focused on accelerating
the evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). OPNFV will establish a
carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers
will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and to ensure consistency,
performance and interoperability among multiple open source components.

Open Source for NFV is a key element for better integration with the other already blooming open source projects such as OpenDayLight, OpenStack and CloudStack as well as no need for vendor lock-in with hardware and support contract.

Akanda

On Nov 3, 2014, DreamHost announced launching a new company called Akanda specializing in network virtualization technology. DreamHost had been using the NFV on their OpenStack platform for over a year in production before spinning out this new company. Here is a nice write up on Akanda. According to this article: "Akanda NFV implementation provides OpenStack
integrated L3 network virtualization on a VMware NSX L2 overlay. It interfaces
with the OpenStack Neutron REST APIs and includes a sophisticated management
and orchestration platform to monitor, configure, and manage virtualized
routers. In the future, Akanda will be extended to virtualize additional
network functions, including load balancing and firewalls, and will feature
pluggable backends to alternative L2 overlays."

Also as indicated on one of my previous blog post on "Networking options for Dockers" that one networking option for Docket is SDN and there is a new company called SocketPlane bringing SDN into Docker and this will open up ways using a container for NFV or in this case NFD (Network Function Dockerization) <- a new name that I come up with based on the word "Dockerize".

When we go to SocketPlane's website we will see "Native to Docker", "Familiar to NetOps" and "Application Friendly".
I think this 3 phases summarize the product direction that this company
is heading. One more thing to note is that the founders of this startup are
all veterans of the OpenDayLight projects along with former executive from OpsCode/Chef.

A lots of efforts are being put into integrating containers to work on OpenStack especially in the area of container orchestration where OpenStack Heat can fill in the void. This provides good opportunity for Network Function to be dockerize and being deployed in OpenStack.

Container orchestration is an important area for container to be deployed in any cloud environment. In Amazon Web Services Re:Invent, AWS announced EC2 Container Service in addition to its Docker support in AWS Elastic BeanStalk.

When the orchestration puzzle for container is solve, putting network function in a container can provide more cost saving than putting the networking function on a virtual machine. It can also provide better CAPEX and operational efficiency because of leaner resource utilization.

OpenStack and NFV
In the OpenStack Juno release NFV features are added to Nova to lay the
groundwork for large scale providers to further abstract networking
capabilities. A sub team is formed under the Neutron and I think the
feature developed under this sub team will be introduce in the Kilo
release.

Service provider is looking for a open platform to deliver their
services and we can see this trend by the forming of the Open Platform
NFV.

OpenStack and NFV is an attractive combination because with the
orchestration power of OpenStack NFV is made more powerful to deliver
the virtualized network function in a quicker and automated manner.

A lots of works still needs to be done for NFV in OpenStack.

In the press release for the Juno release from OpenStack, the work done is to lay a foundation for OpenStack to be the platform for NFV deployment. It also mentioned that: NFV represents a massive shift in how networking and telco services
are developed and deployed. An NFV development team was formed in May
at the OpenStack Summit and has identified nine use cases to run NFV
workloads on top of OpenStack environments. Initial features arrived in
the Juno release, and additional NFV-related work will continue over
coming releases.
The OpenStack NFV development team has put together a good wiki page with a very comprehensive description of OpenStack and NFV including mission statement, definition of NFV, who are working on this project as well as some use cases for NFV in OpenStack.

APIs for NFV in OpenStack
On important and yet not so easy job is to define the APIs for NFV in OpenStack. The main idea for the API for abstraction and yet user of the API will have to provide the detail parameters for deploying NFV based on individual customer's need.

How do we strike the balance between abstraction and the necessity of providing ability to tune the system by changing parameters?

OpenStack Carrier-grade NFV requirement
At this time the integration of NFV in OpenStack is geared toward Service Providers. There seems to be more use cases for NFV in the Telco space. There are 3 requirements that is specific to carrier-grade NFV (not just for OpenStack):

Performance

Deterministic

Reliability

I work for the enterprise division of Alcatel-Lucent and I can see that carrier-grade does demand more in these 3 areas. Workload for one customer may not be very high but for service providers they have a lots of average workload customer plus the service providers have to maintain the service according to the SLA (Service Level Agreement).

To satisfy the carrier-grade requirement, the OpenStack development team is working on the following technologies to make sure the OpenStack infrastructure can deliver the best "horse power" or near native performance from the underneath hardware:

Pinning a vCPU to a physical cpu of a multi-socket processor can help access the processor's local memory (L3 Cache) and thus boosting the processing speed.

Large Page Table size

Larger page table size can help the VM running as NFV to keep the data in memory instead of fetching them from storage.

Big Potential for 2015 I am only touching the surface of this subject and there are lot more to it. In the month of November 2014 both Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent announced that they are offering virtualized high end/performance router catching up with Cisco and Brocade's Vyatta Router for NFV. Seems like the year of 2015 we will see hot competition in the carrier market NFV platform.